Totem and Taboo: 10 years after 9/11

The day long ceremonies at Ground Zero are over. The grief of the families of victims and first responders were palpable. New York, officials tell us, is not the same.



A new New York has risen from the ashes of 9/11.

Patriotic speeches aside, the US has been greatly transformed: it is mired in financial distress and stress. Its arch friend Osmana Bin Ladin’s flesh is moulding in a watery grave, yet his revenge is everywhere to be seen in the decline of America.

Consider 80 per cent of America’s economy is claimed by the military. The 20 per cent marked out for the civilian economy will fall very soon under the scalpel of the lunatic fringe of the US ruling class. The voracious ogre of the military industrial complex has a gargantuan appetite that is never satisfied. The idiocy of America’s financiers have thrown the economy on the ropes owing to the greed to stuff pockets with profits, thereby provoking a worldwide recession in 2008, which looks as though it is coming back with a strong second breath.

The chosen war which Bush with lying stealth pushed the US into Iraq has mightily failed, draining the country of its men and women and emptying its treasury. The war in Afghanistan is going nowhere fast in spite of massage infusions of troops and dollars. No exist is in sight for with war; furthermore even if the US pulls out troops, it will be forced by the logic of its failure to prop up client regimes. And so the waste and drain of troops and money and corruption and bribery loop back and forth and around in a vicious cycle. [And what about the wrack and ruin and death and debilitating legacy that these wars have visited on Iraq and Afghanistan?]

Bin Laden has succeeded beyond his wildest imagination in humbling the US: he has sentenced the American people to a lackluster future of reduced circumstances and comfort; for him 9/11, has stripped the obese American wealth not quite to the bone, but enough to condemn future generations to a standing and status of living in a once powerful empire living in the glories of the past and the niggardly frugality of a cramped and barren existence.